


Moon's Marrow

by Dovey



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Gen, Reincarnation, Revenge, fairytale esque
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 03:47:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17480567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dovey/pseuds/Dovey
Summary: Sasuke and Naruto are reincarnations by the will of the sage of six paths. Sakura is a reincarnation by the will of his mother. They were always destined to end up like this.





	Moon's Marrow

**Author's Note:**

> why is a power corrupting when one women welds it, but not when one man does? Simple. 
> 
> It always corrupts. The winner is just the one to tell the story.

  
  
It started with  Kotsuzui. It didn’t, actually, except for in her story. For everyone else, it starts with Indra and Asura. But this is her story, and so it starts with Kotsuzui. 

It goes like this: Sons steal from their mother until they suck her dry. Kaguya is sealed away and her strength is taken. Better to be misused by man than misused by beast, they claim, and Kaguya learns her lesson. 

Women are not men. That makes them beasts. She has a daughter, in that endless cavern of her own sons’ trap, as he draws on her strength and ignores all her lessons.That’s Kotsuzui. Perhaps this is why she has no tale: beasts have no need for stories, and neither does she. If she did, this is the story Kaguya would have told her:

There once was a lonely princess who ate a forbidden fruit to gain the knowledge she needed to save her people. She gained power, but she never stopped being lonely. 

It’s a sad story, and a useless one, and Kotsuzui is stronger than that, better than that, because Kaguya raised her to be  _ free _ . The girl springs forth fully formed and runs, far and fast until she is safe from her siblings. 

Zetsu is a beast that lives to help their mother, but Kotsuzui simply lives. She feasts on the chakra of men and lives in a forest that grows from the remains of her kills, and she lives a very long time before she is caught and killed by her long-distant brother’s son while her mother still locked away. The forest of bones is what survives their fight, and all her future incarnations feel drawn to it in the years to come. 

For a while, she rests with her mother in the moon. But her spirit is drawn back out eventually, lonely as she is, and she learns the world is all the worse for her time away. 

When she is born as Tobirama, her voice is deep and her features are sharp and she learns to respond to a title she doesn’t want. She’s a bastard son and there’s no home for her, there, but she tries to make one anyways. For her brother. It does not work well.

Her brothers have never loved her, never needed her, and even when they are not raised together she is  _ nothing  _ in comparison to the bond that simmers between them. Hashirama does not love her, and she feels like a fool for the sacrifices she makes in his name. She thinks, perhaps, that things would be different, if she’d been Madara’s sibling instead. His madness only began when he lost his little brother, after all. 

When she’s reborn, it’s with little rest between her lives, and she seeks out Madara without realizing it. She thinks she loves him. One day, he kills her too. She is fifteen when she dies, and she has sent her own mother crashing back to a prison without even realizing it, for him, for  _ them,  _ these boys whos’ approval she so desperately wants, and then he kills her to keep her out of the way. It’s a final betrayal. She begins her next life. 

She’s born to a man with red eyes and dark red hair and teeth sharp enough to bite through the flesh of the woman nursing her. It earns her the name Akane. She cries for three days, drives the neighbors crazy, and then she sleeps. When she wakes up, she never cries again. 

She’s sent to the academy and makes a name for herself there. She loves her mother and hates her teachers, and she stares out the window at the stone faces that look back, and she asks her favorite question.

Why, she asks, often and loud.  _ Why.  _ rarely does she get answers, and her mother finds her reports filled with complaints. 

One day Akane sees a photo of a girl with pink hair and green eyes and a smile that doesn’t settle on her lips and she asks her mother about her, and her mother says,  _ Sakura was a good girl and you can’t ever grow up to be like her.  _ Her mother’s face twists into a frown that quivers at the ends and Akane pretends she doesn’t see her cry, and she feels the first tears on her cheeks since she was a babe and she knows that she has to learn more. 

Father says that  _ that girl died for those two idiots and you can’t ever do the same,  _ and Akane can tell it’s the same thing that mother said with different words.

There’s a wall in her head and she scratches it down over the years, brick by brick, inch by inch, and that’s when she meets Kotsuzui. And Tobirama, and Sakura, and Kaguya too, because she’s her mother’s daughter, and they are all many things and many people but in the end it’s Akane’s decision and she was born to _ rage _ . 

So she does. 

She finds the blonde one first. He’s worn down from time, only thirty but already looking worse for the wear. His son looks just like how he used to, and is just as much a brat. So she finds him, and she kills him, and it’s  _ easy _ . He’d made a pet of her a slice of her mother’s ghost, and it makes her laugh, because he thinks he can make Kaguya hurt her daughter just because he’d forgotten for little while who he was from. The kyuubi tears him apart from the inside, roars to the surface, and Akane does not care what he does after that but she doubts it’s anything kind.

The one with black hair is harder to find, normally, but he comes running back when he finds out that she’s killed his friend-lover?-teammate. He looks just like Indra, just like Madara, just like every man who’s killed her in the past, and she doesn’t hesitate to break him too. He thinks this is about her  _ mother,  _ and it makes her laugh.

_ It is, it is, it is, _ she wants to say. _but you've got the_ **__Wrong_ _ ** _mother_ **_._ ** _ It’s about my mother and your father and how my brothers stole and I gave. It’s about how your father stole from a my thief of a mother all those years ago and claimed to be righteous for it. It’s because my mother is a beast, and I am too, and I finally remembered that.  _

She doesn’t say anything. She doubts he deserves it. 

Akane dies. Not at their hands, but at their families- wives and children and jounin sensei. It’s satisfying, to be torn apart by the people who loved and  _ loved  _ and were never loved back the way they deserved. At least their rage is met with an equal ferver. 

Chiyoko is born with white hair and red eyes and a self-satisified smile twisting at her lips, and she laughs with sharp teeth when she’s born. 

There’s no Indra. No Ashura. Their father had always been so limited, his vision focused on keeping Kaguya trapped, and she had been. There was no need for them to be reborn. 

Kotsuzui was not born to carry a legacy, to deliver a future, to inheret an empire. Kotsuzui was born to be  _ free.  _

Chiyoko lives. She loves. She isn’t lonely. That’s enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> karin is Akane's mother. Every name is intended to have a specific meaning, hopefully i was not tricked by my resources on their exact meaning, ha. 
> 
> i have a lot of feelings about sakura (no shit lol) and while i normally love her as a girl in a story about fates who makes her own, i also felt like theres so much left unsaid about the fact that the reincarnations claim to be a story about brothers, or sometimes a story about the approval of a father, when it's the mother who's the center of it all. about how women are viewed in the naruto universe, and how that could eventually backfire on the shinobi playing at gods when the only real god in the universe is a woman with a grudge.


End file.
